Apparently, NHS bosses have instructed CCGs, NHS trusts and local authorities to come up with a plan for making general practice more sustainable next year.
Which is good, isn’t it? Because it’s an acknowledgement that, currently, it’s unsustainable. Though I think the word they’re actually looking for is ‘unbearable’.
Anyhow, I’ll save the suits a whole heap of work by providing my own plan, which they’re welcome to plagiarise in its entirety.
1. Pay us. As in, you know, just pay us. Money we’re owed, for work we’ve done. That’s flu money, avoiding unplanned admissions DES money and any other money you’re planning CQRS to shrug its stupid incompetent shoulders over.
2. Pay us some more. For what we do already. But without the psychotic breakdown each month caused by ‘1’ above. And without 8 to 8, 7/7 strings attached.
3. Having paid up, and given us a rise, you can then, on top of that, pay our defence subs. Because working a month, in effect, for nothing, is a bummer.
4. Call off the media hounds.
5. Scrap the CQC.
6. Scrap appraisal and revalidation.
7. Scrap stupid DESs. It’s not like we’re being paid for them, anyway (see point 1).
8. Stop micromanaging us to within an inch of our lives. Stop reorganising everything all the time. And stop dreaming up a new contract/model of care every time you have a dump.
9 Sort out medication shortages. I don’t know what the problem is and I don’t care, just get a grip on it, will you? What’s the frigging point of training for a degree in medicine when there isn’t any?
10. Provide a PALS equivalent for GPs. A phone number, manned by a human being, which will sort out the myriad hospital/GP interface bunches of prescribing/investigating/chasing up/following up/monitoring/please do or see or tell bollocks we face every sodding day.
Then, having sorted out 1-10 above, just f** off and leave us alone.
Alternatively, I’d sacrifice all of the above if you would simply pour a skipful of finest quality pigs**t over Messrs Hunt and Field while I stand there clapping. Ideally, though, how about both?
Dr Tony Copperfield is a GP in Essex. You can follow him on Twitter @DocCopperfield
